Last week we started to read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. I had a lot of problems with the stylistic choices that Morrison made through her novel, but this week delving deeper into the text looking for clues and hints about underlying themes I find it very creative. One of the main things that I took notice of was her use of colors as descriptions and letting the connotation of such adjectives fend for themselves: being loosely interpreted by any reader. Obviously the title of the book hints at this (BLUEST), but I feel that there is a lot more to this motif alluding
to the omnipresent focus on skin color and racism within the novel.
The two girls, Frieda and Claudia are constantly battling the propaganda they see of “synthetic yellow bangs suspended over marble-blue eyes” (191), and are at odds with how they will never fit the mold of the dominating belief of white beauty. In Bump’s essay he says that it is “this basic shame… [that is] key to racism and many other behaviors” (X334). This shame he derives from the color of skin. The society that Morrison details in her book does not offer alternatives for social rank prescribed by skin color. Black women are in a position where everybody in the world can give them orders. “White women said, ‘Do this.’ White children said, ‘Give me that.’ White men said, ‘Come here.’ Black men said, ‘Lay down.”(139). I like to think, maybe too naively at times, that we live in a progressive world that entertains racial boundaries by celebrating them rather than putting them down, but am faced with opposition on occasion.
In the last quote, black women are inferior subjects from every source imaginable… even within their own race of ‘minorities’. Here is where I find the issue of racism to be a particular matter of concern that I would not have considered until recently. In The Bluest Eye, there is tension between Maureen Peal and the girls for something that they refer to as the Thing. Even though she is black just like them, they find something to hate. Again Bump responds to this in saying the “ultimate secret… may be our seeming helplessness in the grip of emotions generated by our tendency to judge ourselves and others by appearance” (334). Is it the competitive drive within human nature that allows us to feel bad things to members of people who are even closely, and definably in our same situation?
At my high school, I witnessed a lot of racial discrimination. Austin High does not have an ethnic group that accounts for more than 50% of its population. I think that the percentages are more like this: White 40%, Hispanic 40%, African American and Asian 20%. My sophomore year I saw first hand the power of racial diversity and its counterparts. My soccer team had several Spanish-only speaking players that would make jokes and insult those of us who did not speak the language in Spanish. For me, that was the moment that I was turned off by Spanish, and learning the language altogether even though I had never tried.
This year, some of the closest friends that I have met are of Hispanic decent, and have shown me the beauty of the language, and it has made me want to learn the language. I know this is incredibly hypocritical, but I have to ask myself: why does the FACE of diversity have to account for so much of what it can hold. In other words, if I had met these friends 8 years ago, I may have taken Spanish, but I judged and was mislead in my thinking because of my own pride. This is a key example of what Bump asserts when he says “in human beings emotion is more basic and more pervasive than reason” (331).
Granted, if we were blind many of the beauties of the world would go unattended, and I am sure human nature would find another way to discriminate, but I challenge myself now to focus on the feeling of the “deep purples” , the “cool yellows”, the “streaks of green” (115), the “calm blues” (115) of all the colors that are within us.
In the video, try and just listen to the song first, and then watch it… does your reaction change when seeing whose voice is who? Are certain things justified?
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